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Posts Tagged ‘GW Bush’

Whichever way you look at it, the final war before the COLLAPSE has started

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the increasing American war front across the world: from Afghanistan to Africa and Latin America. This is the Third World War in all but name, waged by the only aggressive “ism” that denies it is an ideology and threatened not by introverted tribesmen in faraway places but by the anti-war instincts of its own citizens.

Have a nice world war, folks

25 Mar 2010John Pilger

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the increasing American war front across the world: from Afghanistan to Africa and Latin America. This is the Third World War in all but name, waged by the only aggressive “ism” that denies it is an ideology and threatened not by introverted tribesmen in faraway places but by the anti-war instincts of its own citizens.

Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.

Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.

Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent.”

This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a “partner”. We should interrupt their fun.

Now, indict his former Commander in Chief

US ex-soldier found guilty of Iraq rape and murder by Kentucky jury

A jury in the state of Kentucky has found a former US soldier guilty of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder her family.

Steven Green, 24, was found guilty on all 17 counts and faces a possible death sentence for his crimes.

“Four other soldiers are serving sentences of between five and 110 years for their roles in the 2006 attack.” BBC reported.

Three of the soldiers had admitted holding down their victim, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, raping her and then murdering her, her parents and her younger sister at the family’s home in Mahmudiya before torching the building.

He will be sentenced on Monday.

“In August 2007, Private Jesse Spielman was convicted of conspiracy to rape and murder and sentenced to 110 years in prison for his role in the incident.”

Yesterday, representative Dennis Kucinich submitted 50,000 more names to the clerk of the House demanding impeachment. On Tuesday, Rep. Jim McDermott (D.-WA) spoke on the House floor in favor of impeachment. As Rep. Kucinich said yesterday, more than 2 million Americans have signed petitions demanding impeachment, making it one of the greatest exercises in grassroots democracy in recent times.

Impeachment has become an unavoidable issue on the floor of the House of Representatives, despite the efforts to take impeachment “off the table.” This amazing development is the result of the work of ImpeachBush.org and others who are petitioning, and joining rallies in cities and towns across the country to demand impeachment. Please make a donation right now to keep up this momentum.

“Standing with me here today are representatives of organizations who have been part of a national grassroots impeachment movement which has collected over a million signatures. Nationally over two million people have signed impeachment petitions. I want to thank the leaders for their efforts and work with them to continue to build a movement for truth.

“9/11 is the day the world changed. We want today, September 10, 2008 to be a new beginning in our efforts to change the world. For my part, I am going to ask those grassroots leaders who have channeled their energies into defending the Constitution and the rule of law to join me in this new endeavor.”

Radhika Miller of ImpeachBush:

Good afternoon, my name is Radhika Miller. I am here representing ImpeachBush.org that was formed by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark on January 18, 2003 from the stage of a rally of 500,000 people who were demonstrating on the National Mall just across the street to demand no war of aggression against Iraq. Today, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi have died and tens of thousands of US service members have been killed or badly wounded. These horrific casualties took place because George W. Bush was allowed and not punished for initiating a war of unprovoked aggression.

Since that time, more than one million people have voted at ImpeachBush.org in favor of impeachment. Volunteers from around the country collect these ImpeachBush petitions.

We want to thank Dennis Kucinich for having the courage and honesty to introduce 35 articles of impeachment in June of this year. Representative Kuncinch speaks for tens of millions of people who insist that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and all officials be held accountable for criminal misconduct, breaking the peace in an unprovoked war of aggression and for shredding the Constitution.

The fact that Bush has four months left in office does not matter one bit when it comes to violating the Constitution. As one speaker after another made clear in the July 25 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee hearing: impeachment is a constitutionally mandated duty and not a matter of partisan politics.

If Congress refuses to carry out its obligations it sends a message to all future presidents, from either Party, that the Constitution has been stripped of all meaning. We have a duty to act and we will.

Arrest Abdullah, He Is a War Criminal!

‘King’ Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is a war criminal like GW Bush, Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell …. Without Abdullah’s approval, his financial and material support for ‘the coalition of the willing’ and their mercenaries, the Iraqi genocide would not have occurred.

Abdullah of Arabia: Complicit in Iraqi Genocide

He should be arrested and detained by the British police while he is visiting London until he can be formally indicted for complicity in genocide.

Submitted by Harry Saloor
Founder
The Management School of
Restorative Business (MSRB)